ACF Take the contents of a text area, de-dupe, remove blanks and sort list.

This is a PHP function that takes the contents of a text area field in WordPress and performs several operations to tidy up the data. The function:

Explodes the text area content into separate lines using the “\n” line break character.
Trims white space from each line using the array_map function with the trim function.
Removes any blank lines and duplicates using the array_unique and array_filter functions.
Sorts the lines in alphabetical order using the sort function.
Joins the lines back together into a single string using the implode function and the PHP_EOL line break character.

Finally, the function is added as a filter to the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) update value process for the text_list field. This means that every time the text_list field is updated, the tidy_textarea_lines function will be executed to process the text area contents.

text_list name of your ACF Text Area field. ACF New Lines set to Automatically add paragraphs.

/**
	* Take the contents of a text area, de-dupe, remove blanks and sort.
	*
	* @param string $string Text area content.
	*
	* @return string
	*/
	function tidy_textarea_lines( $string ) {
	$source_lines = explode( “\n”, str_replace( “\r”, ”, $string ) );
	$source_lines = array_map( ‘trim’, $source_lines ); // Trim white space from lines.
	$source_lines = array_unique( array_filter( $source_lines ) ); // Remove blanks & duplicates.
	sort( $source_lines );
	return implode( PHP_EOL, $source_lines );
	}
	add_filter( ‘acf/update_value/name=text_list‘, ‘tidy_textarea_lines’, 10, 1 );